Zulu Mod!!!

[dclare4]

Hi there Pyradyn, we'd be more than glad for any support or insights you can give. I myself am an enthusiast who's long on research but short on actual experience - never been to South Africa or England and Wales for that matter. We'll try to make it as good as we can and we'd be glad for any insights you can share.

Most grateful,
Harlechman

[Sundjata Keita]

It's great that we get support from people in South Africa (I think two others have posted) and any information you give us would be great. We have been researching very hard for the mod and so we have quite a lot of info at the moment (including all the shield patterns and colours for the different regiments) but really it all just needs sorting out so thanks for the support and we may need you in about 6 months when we finally release a BETA

Sundjata Keita

[dclare4]

Hi there Sundjata,

Thesiger and the Old Deaths comin' your way!

What we could really use now though is a bit more info on the Portuguese army. The way this balances out (as I see it) is:

British - potentially the best units but also the most expensive to recruit. They are a Colonial Power so their regulars are limited to Port Durban.

Portuguese - average units but cheaper and probably better native levies (this is a debatable point, I'm just guessing here). They are a Colonial Power so their regulars are limited to Port Lourenco Marquez.

Boer - superb all locally recruited units, highest value militia units for the Euros but precious little support from home (what home? South Africa is our home!) Boer commando however should be expensive to keep on permanent establishment.

Zulu and "Zulu style" (Ndebele, Swazi, etc) tribal groups - potentially the best melee fighters (after Shaka reforms discovered), locally recruited and able to maintain a long service standing army due to low costs. Minimal firearms units and the best ranged weapons (till enough firearms come along) will be thrown assegais.

African Tribal groups - while I'd like the other groups to be able to develop alternative but effective methods of fighting (they were historically unable to keep up with the Zulu) I think this needs to be discussed further (along with the Portuguese) to make sure they're not a 'pushover'. Technically they would have stuck to thrown assegai and warrior-vs-warrior combat (as opposed to ikhlwa melee fighting by regiment/impi) so I'm wondering if this can be improved on.

Cheers,
Harlechman

[Sundjata Keita]

Well I am hoping that playing as the tribal groups will prove a real challenge and will be for the more hardcore gamer, however we really want to open this experience for the casual gamer and so I think at least on easy difficulty we can give some of the factions bonusses on stats etc. to balance it out. It's like at current in the vanilla RTW you would not think the barbarian factions would ever beat the Romans for skill and so they do so by numbers, this is the same as tribal groups, they massively outnumber the British allowing the player hopefully to develop a stratergy using this advantage to beat the European powers.

Well in the mean time we better get some more models done, here are the 17ths. With lovely texture from dclare.



Regards,

Sundjata Keita

[dclare4]

It occurred to me (well... hopefully we're not too late.) we should back up the threads in TWCenter.

Harlechman

[Sundjata Keita]

Good idea, they contain quite a bit of info, I have most of the pictures and maps stored already but a lot of the text is useful. It was restoring a backup yesterday I think but before that I posted Zulu technology tree and a list of Zulu weapons, I have a backup of the tech but not of the weapons. I will backup our threads as soon as they come back online.

Regards,

Sundjata Keita

[dclare4]

By the way Sundjata, that was a great idea, compiling the tech tree. I'll check it out in a bit. I just saw that they're back online again.

Also, did you get that 'Scottie' I sent you last weekend ;-) I separated the shoulder straps (they're in the same position for the 17th Lancer and should go over the crossbelts - if the crossbelts are the same, we might actually just do them as part of the texture rather than having a separate object for them. My worry is figures like the British infantry where one crossbelt supports the haversack and the other supports the canteen) and for the infantry there's a bunch of other paraphernalia including canteen, haversack, bayonet scabbard and frog and some straps.

Cheers,
Harlechman